Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
YouTube used to fill any blank space around videos in full-screen playback with black.
The app recently changed that behavior to now render in a shade of gray, instead.
That results in some oddly striped patterns for videos that already have embedded black bars.
Between landscape and portrait orientation, widescreen and 4:3, and everything else along that spectrum, there are just about a million and one different shapes videos can come in. And since the screens we view these clips on are stuck in whatever shape they are, some of the time that’s going to mean that things aren’t a perfect fit. When that happens, you can either zoom in to fill the blank space, or choose to embrace the empty real estate at the edges of your display. YouTube users on Android going that latter route have recently begun noticing some unexpected behavior.
Normally, that blank space around a YouTube video that’s not fully filling your screen is meant to be black — just an empty, video-less void. But after a recent update, users like diffysaro99 on Reddit and krazyfrog, VedantKalore, and cheeseco_ on X have been complaining about that blank space now being rendered an intermediate shade of gray.
On its own, that’s maybe a neutral change, but the problem really becomes apparent when you look at content that’s already been composited with black bars on the sides that are now part of the video itself — with this new behavior from the app, we get videos that are sandwiched between pairs of gray and black bars. And that looks… not great. The behavior appears to be distinct from YouTube’s ambient mode, which intentionally fills dark areas of the screen with color for aesthetic purposes.
Google actually may agree that this is undesirable, as we see an official Team YouTube X account respond to these reports:
We hear you. Confirming we’re aware and currently working to fix it. Appreciate your patience in the meantime
That message was shared two days ago, and as of now we’re still seeing this behavior from the app. We’ve reached out to Google in an attempt to learn a little more about what’s happening here. Was this an intentional change that’s just being poorly received? Or did something go wrong behind the scenes?
We’d also love to get any idea of when we might hope to see black backgrounds return. So far we’ve yet to hear back, but we’ll be sure to update this post with anything Google has to share. For now, you’re just going to have to try to find the silver lining in these gray bars.
